by Jim Nesbitt
Behind the flash of Crowe’s irresistible smile there was a hardness that most didn’t notice, encountered only by the persistent, the competitive or the love-crazed. Behind the gold flecks that brightened the hazel eyes, back where someone really had to be looking to find it, was a deep and abiding coldness, mirthless as a power saw, mean only in its lack of compassion.
Teammates sometimes saw it surface in the heat of a game, in the huddle, an icy laser at a hapless tackle who blew a block or a receiver who ran the wrong pattern, targets who were broken and useless to him, not to be trusted or used when it was all hanging by only the spring in his legs and the strength of that right arm. There was the fullback who fumbled early in a Quad-A title game; when the coach called that boy’s number on fourth-and-goal and his team trailing by five, Crowe ignored him, called a bootleg and scored himself.
Later that same game, a blitzing linebacker blew through the pocket, slamming a forearm into Crowe’s face, knocking out three front teeth. But not before Crowe threw a rope of spiraling brown leather that split the numbers of a streaking split end for another six. Spitting teeth and blood, Crowe lined his team up for a two-point play and ran over that linebacker to score again, gashing the opponent’s leg with his spikes and spitting blood in the boy’s face.
But meanness wasn’t what you saw in that deep pocket Jason Crowe liked to keep hidden because meanness wasn’t a central motivation. It was just a tool to be used along with cruelty, sweetness, smooth talk or a well-executed seduction, not an end unto itself. You might see a flash of mean coming through the gold flecks of his eyes just like you might see a flash of kindness or carnal intent.
Mean wasn’t what turned his crank. He never killed cats as a kid or slapped his wives around or abused a partner or hired hand just because he could and it gave him a thrill. There was something else sitting in the closely guarded recesses of those brilliant eyes, shadowed by a shock of thick, razor-cut black hair, dead straight and shiny.
What you saw was the relentless calculation of a computerized spread sheet and the whirring precision of a machine that couldn’t love or forgive. If you ever got in that deep.
Few did.
The machine was in high gear at this moment, restless and frantic. The computer was zipping through a worrisome program, searching for a solution. Don’t overheat. Don’t crash. Run through the loop one more time, clipping the binaries and the if-thens, triple-checking the unwanted answer. And run through it again. All while steering a mustard-colored Mercedes 250 SL through a mid-morning jam in downtown Monterrey, a cellular phone jammed to his right ear.
“. . . that transfer cannot be accomplished, Señor Goldschmidt. There are not enough assets in the account to . . .”
“Are you sure you have the right number? Let me read it to you again — Two-zero-zero-four-eight-five-zero-zero-nine-dash-three-four-one-one-dash-L-as-in-Lima-P-as-in-Papa.”
“Correct. We have the right account. But I am showing a balance of only $7,000 U.S. at this time.”
“Can you check and see if a deposit of $500,000 U.S. cleared?”
“It did. Ten days ago. The last of three deposits. Then we show a withdrawal for wire transfer by you four days ago.”
“That’s impossible. I didn’t call you then.”
“Our records show that you did. The proper access codes were given. The party asked for the correct officer in the sequence you established with Señor Montelban. And the faxed request for the wire transfer appeared to be in order.”
“Let me speak with Señor Montelban.”
“I am afraid he is not at the bank right now, Señor Goldschmidt.”
Jason Willard Crowe was seized by sudden ripping clarity.
The bitch has my money!
She knows which Dominican bank to call. She knows the codes, the account numbers, the right officer to ask for, the right things to say to him and the proper electronic handshake.
The bitch has my money!
Not all of it but an icy and righteous one-point-five mil, lifted from those technologically innocent-but-deadly gentlemen from New Orleans. A lamentable loss of capital but a far more disturbing disruption of the carefully structured system of false identities, codes, accounts and instructions scattered from Houston, across the Caribbean, down through Central America and bending back to Mexico. A shadow network established during the days he was pulling the strings of international finance for the greaseballs, a fast track set down for just this moment and just this purpose — a quick transfer of thirty million, much of it long buried from skimmed accounts, some of it still quivering from the fresh sting he engineered three weeks ago, back when the y’ats thought they were doing him a favor by staging his death and spiriting him out of the country.
The bitch has my money! She has access to my system!
He didn’t waste time wondering how. That was easy — she pried her way into his PowerBook, he supposed, and copied all the codes, numbers and names on a diskette.
Clever girl.
She got past the passwords, the maze of false files he set up and discovered the data sprinkled in the middle of a dummy spreadsheet for a company that didn’t exist. But who told her why this was important, who gave her the clue that these numbers and codes dealt with the most vulnerable point in the whole operation?
The Dominican bank was the junction of the scheme, the place where he was funneling money squirreled away in dozens of old accounts, parking it there until he could shuffle the stash into a score of bright and shiny new accounts waiting in Switzerland, Singapore, Turks and Caicos, Luxembourg, Hong Kong and Macau. Because this was the transfer point and his plan demanded speed, it was the one place where his exposure was the greatest and he needed the most security. He thought he had wired up everything. Everything except that damn PowerBook.
And his damn wife. She wasn’t a tech-head; she could barely operate a Krups coffeemaker. She damn sure wasn’t a hacker. She had to be playing ball with someone, playing along, screwing the tech-savvy patsy until she could screw them over.
For being stupid enough to write down anything concerning this key aspect of the plan, he allowed himself a small measure of anger and self-loathing, then shrugged it all off like a blindside sack on second-and-eight.
Focus on the next play. Forget the mistake — it was the price you paid for haste, complexity, an addiction to laptops and an inability to memorize the figures you can so easily manipulate.
The machine stopped whirring. He became calm. His path was clear, open and obvious, despite the catastrophe, as choreographed and automatic as the jukes and shifts on a broken field scramble out of the pocket. He downshifted into the old sixth sense of a jock, where everything slows and there is all the time in the world to make the right move.
He remembered an old lesson, one from the worn text of the athlete and the warrior. There is simplicity in crisis; chaos and chance often narrow the options and make the choices easy, even if they are dangerous and unsavory. The cool competitor knows this and accepts it.
Athletic cool had already come in handy once in the past three months, back when the feds and his coke-head yupster investors, burned and angry, started to close in, endangering his continued ability to drive to the club and complete a round of golf, threatening him, a prized asset of the greaseballs, and his continued liberty to do their bidding.
When the dogs started yapping, he kept thinking: Not now! Not now! Too soon! Then the cool kicked in. He downshifted. He concentrated on the action, modifying his game plan to meet the fresh threat of the playing field, setting up a new system to move the cash faster. Helped the y’ats stage his own death. Just walked away from everything he owned. And pulled it off without a hitch, like scoring six standing up.
Now a new threat. From his wife. A blitzing linebacker, a conniving wife with her hand on his money — what’s the difference? Downshift and deal with the challenge. Do it. Crowe knew he needed to go back to Houston.
But not before keeping an appointment
. At an exclusive hair salon, frequented only by the rich and reclusive. For a special `do — yes, indeed. He wanted a new look — a brush cut and a gray dye job. Hair just shy of a military crop, more like something you’d see cruising through a leather bar. Something for the sporting rump ranger. Something to match the blue contacts. Maybe a moustache. Maybe not. He guided the Mercedes up a broad tree-lined avenue that wound past the iron gates and thick walls of Monterrey’s most expensive villas.
A new look. Do this, then go to Houston. For two reasons —money from the sale of the coke and smack he hoisted from the y’ats and to smoke out his wife, to find out just how far she had penetrated his system, whether she knew the end destination of his cash, a quarter of which was still in the upper end of the pipeline, awaiting transfer to the new accounts.
He knew he would have to drastically alter his appearance to make this move. He knew Houston would be crawling with people looking to clip him quick — wiseguys homegrown and from New Orleans, cops crooked and straight, cowboys hired by angry investors in his broken oil and gas deals, freelance talent that sniffed blood in the water.
And whatever allies the Savannah had mustered. Of course, he would have to kill her but that gave him no special thrill. She shared his bed for four years when she wasn’t wandering, and a body like Savannah’s was a terrible thing to turn cold.
TEN
Burch heard the scream before he could push the door of his pickup open against the humid blanket of Houston heat. And again before he could swing his battered legs toward the pavement and reach inside the wear-shined linen of his Yugoslavian sport coat to thumb the catch off the tooled cowhide El Paso Saddlery shoulder rig that held his Colt.
The sound came from a window two floors up, from a brick-faced brace of townhouses cushioned by moss-draped oak trees and sealed from the rush of traffic down Kirby by two blocks of side street and a wall of wrought iron, concrete and more brick. And an electric gate with a card key that he didn’t have.
This was Savannah’s hiding place. No doubt. The address matched the one given him by Consuela Martin, her old Dallas running mate, and the screams sounded like they were coming from what could be her unit.
Burch glanced up and down the street and saw no traffic. No helpful residents rolling toward home to let him in. And he saw no cars moving toward the gate from inside.
Only one choice — vault the gate, bad knees, belly and all. He groaned at the thought even as his legs started the choppy steps that he hoped would give him enough momentum to jump and reach a cross bar about seven feet up. If he could do that and if he could clamber up the scrolled and scalloped ironwork that fanned across the bottom two-thirds of the gate in a Big Easy fleur-de-lis pattern, then he might be able to bull his way up and over. If his snakeskin boots didn’t slip. And if more than two decades of Luckies and bourbon didn’t make this a check his heart couldn’t cash.
His first attempt started with such promise. A jump that only a black bear or some other lumbering field beast could love. But it grabbed him enough air to get both hands wrapped around the crossbar. He wedged his boots between the gate’s iron scrolls and started muscling himself toward the top. The slick sole of one boot slipped, shifting his weight to the left, the momentum tearing his off-hand away from the bar — the start of a heavy fall on his blue-jeaned ass, a jolt he could feel through the roof of his mouth and the top of his brain pan.
On the way to the superheated driveway apron, a spike of iron caught his right sleeve, ripping the Tito-era linen at the armpit and in a jagged slash from elbow to wrist. That same spike raked the Colt from his holster, sending the gun clattering across rough-finished concrete. His left hand broke the fall and was sanded bloody and raw by the same concrete that was ruining what was left of the worn bluing on his pistol.
“Goddam, cockbite, motherfucker, Christamighty shit . . .”
His hand felt like it was hot-wired to a car battery and plugged into a gas station air pump. He could taste the jolt of his fall on the tongue. Blood too. He tried to stand and his left knee locked up, a sliver of cartilage from the old football wars slipping into something it shouldn’t, like a barroom lech nailing married strange with a husband working the swing shift at Texas Instruments — when hubby wasn’t sitting two stools away. He sat up in the middle of the apron and started kneading his knee, trying to work out the chip, cocking his ear for screams. Silence. Not good. Not good at all.
“C’mon goddamit. Get the fuck out of there you little piece of shit.”
He didn’t hear the Saab until its grille was about a foot away from his right ear and the driver tapped the Swedish horn twice. His heart lurched as he spun away from the noise, sprawling across the concrete to grab his Colt, the sudden motion causing the chip to pop out of his knee.
“Would you please move!”
Her hair was streaked with tinting the color of butterscotch. Bangs cutting just above the eyebrows. Locks as straight and thick as a show horse’s mane, shoulder-length and pulled back, sunglasses sitting just so on a crown of hair, just where the bangs fell forward and the rest swept back.
She didn’t see the Colt in his hand. She just saw a hulking, bald-headed guy in jeans, sunglasses and a cheap jacket with a torn sleeve. Well below her on life’s economic ladder. Obviously. Just look at the jacket. And look at those boots. Snakeskin. Of the gaudy, belly-cut and brightly dyed style seen in border bars and Telephone Road icehouses. Worn by a man who is definitely not Tejano chic. Ugly, in the way, and too slow and stupid to get up and off the hot concrete. Too dumb to recognize class and scurry from its path.
She tapped the horn again. Longer this time. He stepped to the side and she started to put the car in gear, assuming he was getting out of her way. He wasn’t. Quicker than she thought possible, he was by the driver’s window, the Colt holstered, a thick hand wrapped around the arm she had perched atop the door, grabbing her halfway between her elbow and the thin bracelet of Navajo silver that Bryce bought her in Santa Fe.
“If you blow that horn one more time lady, I’m gonna snap that steering wheel off the column and wrap it around your rich girl neck. Your plastic surgeon won’t like that worth a damn, will he?”
“Let go of me! Who the hell do you think you are?”
“I’m a man in quick need of getting in your damn little fortress there because a friend of mine has been screaming her head off, I’ve fallen off that damn gate and I can’t get my fat ass up and over.”
“Who is your friend?”
“Savannah Crowe.”
Burch saw her wrinkle her nose slightly in the manner of someone too polite to mention a fart but too wrapped up in the scorekeeping of society to let it go unnoticed.
“I take it you two don’t fuck the same tennis pro.”
“You son of a bitch, she doesn’t live in this complex! Now let me go!”
The scream reached their ears just as he figured out where the butterscotch queen kept her card key — on the passenger-side visor. He swiped for it with his left hand just as she popped the clutch, stalling the Saab, but not before the door post slammed him in the rib cage and the car dragged him about six feet from where he was standing. His grip never broke from her left arm. His head got wedged between her neck and her tits — implants by the feel of their insistent uprightness on his chin.
Two sets of screams filled his ears — one near, one far. Butterscotch started beating on him with her fists. He planted his feet on the concrete again and pushed himself out of the tight spot between her body and the steering wheel, his face rising into hers, matching her bared teeth grimace with the redneck glare that used to scare the scumbags in East Dallas, banking on the chili and onions he had for lunch and the bile rising in his throat to give him the worst breath of the day since he woke up.
“Shut the fuck up, lady. Shut up or I’m gonna breathe on you some more.”
She started to scream again when he heard the boom of a shotgun and felt the shock of the buckshot as it shattered the f
ront window, showering them both with pellets of safety glass. He pushed himself free of the window, palming the card key, reaching for the Colt and pushing Butterscotch across the center console.
“Stay the hell down!”
He spun toward the rear of the car, his mind’s eye snapping an image of a stocky, dark-skinned man aiming from a second-floor balcony. The shotgun boomed again, the buckshot wanging into the polished green paint of the driver’s door, right where he had been just a second before. He could hear the chilling shiiing-shiiing of the shooter working the pump action, plunging another shell into the chamber as he racked his first round into the Colt.
Two shots. Assume the sportsman’s plug is out of the tube magazine, giving the shooter at least five rounds instead of the three a quail hunter can legally carry. Hell, assume the shooter’s got a riot pump with an extended magazine, giving him eight packages of lovely buckshot to play with.
Useless math. Just assume the guy has to be cooled out muy pronto so a certain bald-headed pee-eye can get his ass in where its pimply self can do something to save his client’s hind end.
Burch was crouched below the door line on the passenger side of the Saab. Butterscotch was wailing: “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus — make it stop.”
Blood from his left hand was making a sticky mess of the Colt’s rubber grip. His knees were screaming from the discomfort of the crouch. His thighs were tightening toward a cramp.
Move fast, move fast, shithead. If there’re two on the move up there, they’ll soon be down here to flank and waste your sorry ass. If there’s only the one on the balcony, covering for whatever’s happening inside, it’s even odds that won’t be offered for long.